RGB video, possibly the best you can get video quality wise in the analog realm.

Most people back then relied on Composite but a few (including most people in France) had RGB video. In fact, the very first home console to get proper RGB video was the French release of the CBS Colecovision in 1983.

However when it came to the obscure CASIO Loopy console released back in 1995, it only provided Composite video with stereo out. It’s probably likely that CASIO thought that little girls didn’t need to be graced with superior image quality…

And yet somehow, they thought it would be clever to mention the fact that it has a 32-bits processor on the box even though the games are not very impressive.

Very classy move, CASIO.

So what’s actually on going under the hood ?

The investigation

I decided to first look at MAME’s source code and see if i could find a clue about the hardware.

It didn’t take long before i found what i wanted : it uses a Sony CXA1645M RGB encoder.

The goal of an RGB encoder is to take an analog RGB signal and convert it down to Composite and/or S-video.

The video quality can depend a lot on whenever the console is provided with good power source to begin with,

making sure there’s no interference etc..

In the case of the Casio Loopy, i have noticed that dot crawl is present on a lot of Casio Loopy videos out there.

Dot crawl is unfortunately something that can be reduced but not eliminated with Composite.

Dot crawl is not a problem on RGB and S-video… provided of course the input source is good to begin with.

Encoder chip

So what about this chip ? Well it has 24 pins in total but only a few handful of them are being used.

The chip can be fed with RGB or Composite video input but of course the whole point of it is to convert RGB to Composite, which it can certainly do.

It does have RGB output pins but in that case, it simply passes through.

Where does the analog video comes from ?

According to PhilBennett3D on twitter, the video DAC inside the main ASIC is responsible for converting the video to analog RGB.

This unfortunately means that a digital RGB mod is not really possible as the chip internally converts it to analog RGB.

The good news however is that this means that the console natively works and output analog RGB !

So what would it take to do an RGB mod on the Casio Loopy ?

I’m not an expert (and it may need a few capacitors for the RGB lines) but all you would need to do is solder

on the RGB pins and the Composite video pin for sync for an RGBS signal.

I honestly don’t see why, bar a few capacitors, this wouldn’t work properly.

Conclusion

The back of the CASIO Loopy. Only Composite video

I bought a loose CASIO loopy for cheap and hope to test this out eventually.

I’m confident i’ll get something out of it in terms of video although i’m not sure if i would need to lift up pins to improve video quality…

That’s something i’m very nervous to do.

Given that the resolution is 256x224, it would seem that using the OSSC settings for SNES would also apply here as well.

The screenshots featured in this article came from Benett’s still WIP CASIO Loopy driver for Mame,

which i hope gets released soon enough at some point.

That’s all for now !